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jbrodkin writes "An open-source, cloud-based e-mail alternative to Microsoft Exchange called Open-Xchange has signed up two new service providers and predicts it will have 40 million users by the end of 2011. Based in Germany, Open-Xchange has tripled its user base from 8 million to 24 million paid seats since 2008, with the help of three dozen service providers including 1&1 Internet, among the world's largest Web hosting companies. Microsoft is still the 800-pound gorilla, with a worldwide install base of 301 million mailboxes in 2010, expected to reach 470 million by 2014. But Open-Xchange is luring numerous service providers who are wary of Microsoft's attempts to compete against its own partners by selling hosted e-mail services directly to its customers."

- OpenChange Server is a transparent and native Exchange replacement for Microsoft Outlook users working on top of Samba 4. With OpenChange, you don't need costly MAPI connectors anymore.

- SOGo is a reliable groupware server with a focus on scalability and open standards. Let your Mozilla Thunderbird/Lightning, Apple iCal/iPhone, BlackBerry and now Microsoft Outlook users collaborate using a modern platform.

OpenChange is very promising, but hardly production ready.SOGo is not a feature per feature match for OX, Scalix, Zimbra or Zarafa. These are all mature projects with a large installed user base. If you are worried about license fees (which usually include paid support), you can always use the free editions of these projects and not use Outlook.

OpenChange seems to be a layer for implementing the proprietary exchange protocols used by outlook, so how difficult would it be to make openchange talk to the free versions of these other projects instead of having a plugin on the client?

SOGo already uses open protocols (e.g. CalDAV, CardDAV, GroupDAV, IMAP) for integrating with clients that support open protocols. For example, it works with Apple's iCal or Mozilla Sunbird for calendaring by using this protocol. You only need the OpenChange when using Microsoft's client - anything else should work directly.

This is also the case for many of the commercial open source offerings. I know at least Zimbra supports the four protocols you mentioned. These protocols are really great and completely open, but their biggest drawback is increased configuration on the client side - not very user friendly.

Inverse, the company behind SOGo, has also released extensions to Lightning and Thunderbird, that provide a better groupware solution if you want a fat client. User configuration is pretty simple with this installed, but it seems like a red herring - anyone using Exchange is likely to have an IT department pushing out preconfigured client installs.

It should be possible. I know it has been done for z-push (open activesync, originally from Zarafa) and Zimbra, an unrelated product. Implementing OpenChange for these projects might not be in the best interest of the involved companies, since most of their revenue comes from charging for their specific Outlook plug-in.

It is true that OpenChange and SOGo look very promising and I am following the news with quite a bit of interest. One day it will be production ready. That said, Open Xchange is open source to a point. I think Open-Xchange is more crippleware because you have to buy the product in order to get Outlook integration, or at least the last time I looked into it.

i could very well put alpha on all of my apps and know they are rock stable. and some proprietary ??finished?? softwares really don't deserve final version.

alpha very well depends on how you develop- if you add feature, make it rock stable, add feature... your alpha will just miss some features but still be better than most finalized- if you add all features and then start polishing... your alpha will really be a piece of shit like you describe

With mplayer allegedly about to go 1.0, Duke Nukem Forever supposedly releasing in May, and E17 libraries declaring 1.0, one simply must assume that Samba 4 and Hurd would *finally* release sometime this year too.

Most businesses want a solution, not a religion. When you are already comfortable with Exchange, any alternative will have to offer some real, tangible benefits.

The most likely potential benefits are:

Greater functionality: No chance. None of the F/OSS clones offer even comparable functionality, let alone greater functionality unless you go out and pay for the commercial version. There are one or two solutions which claim not to fall into this trap, but they fall into the age-old F/OSS trap of

+INF. Any solution, including F/OSS one has to make economic sense. OepnXchange does not. Email is not a business solution, where you can consult post sale/implementation. Email servers are very much a commoditised product, because there is no possible differentiation when it comes to email.

Microsoft are at least partly responsible for this; people expect a lot more than just email these days. They expect fully integrated calendaring which allows you to schedule meetings and see when everyone's available, they expect contacts (both shared and private) which are stored on the server and therefore not lost if your PC is.

This was actually the biggest thing that pushed me away from IMAP and to Google with my (soon to be former) emp

Wow, I thought this was a Slashvertisement for OpenXchange and your specs detail that for me. Those specs. seems to match the business model of Zimbra, another Exchange competitor, right down to the community edition being available for free unsupported. Yet I see no mention of Zimbra in TFA. And I think Zimbra has a lot of users too.

A) They hide/don't have a comparison matrix.
B) They hide the fact that there is a Community edition.
C) Even with those facts, the site looks completely unprofessional. Just compare it to OpenERP's site.
D) They get too much OSS publicity for the charade they are running.

Congrats to them as a company. No benefit to OSS world out of it I sense.

For example, I think Slashdot needs to come up with an alternative logo for Microsoft stories. Sure, the old one was really stale - but at least it looked like a Borg. With the new one, it just looks like Gates is wearing a really poorly-designed Bluetooth phone headset.

Just use the legit corporate logos, anything else is nothing more than flamebait.

I actually agree with you - but, this being Slashdot, it's unlikely to happen. So at a minimum I'd prefer to see a logo that visually represents what it's supposed to represent. This new Microsoft "Borg" icon only works for those of us who were here in the days of the old icon - for anyone new coming in, it's unlikely they'll be able to figure out what it's supposed to be. From a branding perspective, that's a fundamental failure.

First of all, it is technically open source, but the license the community edition uses means it cannot legally be used by businesses.It is definitely not a free alternative to M$ Exchange.Each user license costs $52 for this product, an M$ Exchange CAL costs about as much, maybe a few bucks more.

Whoever designed the web access GUI went icon crazy and they are not very meaningful either.Outlook Web Access is simple, this contraption had me guessing at what buttons do.

I manage an Exchange 2007 environment with roughly 700 users depending on it.Originally having no experience, I got a test server up and running within a day.The administrator tools are simple, powerful, and reliable; overall we have not had any serious issues in the past three years.I also know that if something goes wrong, there is M$ support, service packs, backup software, DB repair tools, forums, etc.

Here is what happens with an open source product:You install the product and spend the next couple of hours wading through text config files.When you do manage to get the product to work, the thing does not work as expected.You spend the next couple of hours cranking up debugging output and wading through source code.If you are really masochistic you end up compiling your own build after you have found a bug.

Now in some cases going open source is worth the pain, especially when it brings additional functionality and cost savings.Unfortunately, this open source product has the goal of duplicating functionality at a similar price point.An additional thing to consider is that most open source products need more maintenance and labor.This additional labor is highly in demand and is not at all cheap, which might make this an even more expensive solution than the original.

I can't say for the functionality, benefits, complexity, etc.. of the article's software, but I can think of many better things to spend 36K on than licensing Exchange. Don't even mention the server side licensing (Unless they've subsequently dropped server CAL requirements for exchange boxes), server first time costs, and yearly subscription fees to keep up to date with all the latest updates and support features that you list so highly. Throwing money at a problem may be -a- solution for -some- companies, but that can't be said for everyone. Of course that all assumes that Exchange is the better maintenance system, but as I see nobody doing empirical analysis, or even anecdotes, its hard for you, me, or the rest of the mob to come up with any sort of rational discourse.

"Here is what happens with an open source product:"

I really like how you pulled the old bait and switch here. Instead of listing the behavior of quoted product, you instead drill into why open source software is bad. Well, if you just took the software and didn't pay a dime for it, then maybe a few of those points apply. Maybe if you paid for the software, you could get paid support and the assurance that when a problem is found that it can actually be addressed without waiting quarters before a company decides to release an update to fix a bug. For real money, you can (for a lot cheaper seemingly) get a system that does more or less what Exchange does. As said earlier, I'd like someone who's actually used both systems in a real world scenario to talk about pros and cons, but since that isn't happening yet, lets keep the rhetoric to ourselves.

I really like how you pulled the old bait and switch here. Instead of listing the behavior of quoted product, you instead drill into why open source software is bad. Well, if you just took the software and didn't pay a dime for it, then maybe a few of those points apply.

Too bad he's more right than not.

Not that a similar thing doesn't happen with closed source products, and be more or equally frustrating.

I've seen this with Apache, with several other softwares, where 1) doesn't work 2) can't figure out why 3) the darn software DOESN'T SAY WHAT'S WRONG

And that's really frustrating.

Back on topic, Exchange may be crap, but the alternatives suck more. At least I've heard nothing good about Zimbra, for example.

The thing about Exchange competitors is unfortunately playing nice with Microsoft's monopoly which means outlook is *everywhere*. Microsoft never makes efforts to support open standards, therefore Outlook will never work well with something like citadel (sure, imap is there, but doing anything more than that requires, surprise, a commercial add-on).

The problem for groupware is not that Exchange is so fundamentally awesome beyond hope of competing on a level playing field, it's that it rides on the success

you install it with 1 click, but then spend the next few days going through GUI config screens./When you do manage to get the product to work, the thing does not work as expected.You spend the next week persuading your boss to send you on a week's training course, for only ten thousand dollars.You come back with a couple of thick binders full of documentation that you already can't remember.You spend a few mo

Exactly right. Wish I had mod points for this. One of the numerous advantages of many open source solutions is that they are designed by hackers and when things go wrong, usually there are very distinct error messages and good logging capabilities. Coupled with some googling and/or IRC rooms, things usually get resolved very quickly. If you're a hacker yourself, you can usually resolve issues pretty quickly.

A common experience for me with closed source has been more along the lines of a message-box-

I think your point is accurate on some open source projects on their own, but a lot of projects work quite well. The same applies to commercial products, sometimes they are solid, sometimes they are hard to use/counterintuitive, and when you have a bug, you don't even have the 'masocist' option of fix it yourself. I have had commercial vendors want to charge me a $200 incident support fee to let me send them a stack trace from their poroduct crashing without an error message. Similarly with support, we h

I agree that OpenXchange is a joke, in all possible scenarios. OpenXchange, because it's backed by a company should already be easy to start with.
Want to see witch OSS projects are easy to start with? MySQL, Tomcat, OpenERP and a lot of others.

In short, Exchange looks a better alternative than this solution. Microsoft doesn't lie about wanting you to pay for their products and support, these guys are going out of their way to make sure you don't go with the GLP licensed option. They are not proud of being of the F/OSS community, they are ashamed of it.

It's not that impressive, really. Zimbra has gone from six million paid mailboxes in 2007, to 40 million in 2009, to 65 million in 2010.I do believe all these commercial open source projects should work together on the OpenChange project to finally get rid of those Outlook connectors.

It's nice that the source on these hosted applications is open - no sarcasm intended. But since they're hosted, the source is open "read only": as a user, if I change the source to do something different, I can't commit it to the source of the hosted app to change it. Only the hosts can. Unless some host is running instances of the server per hosting customer that can be revised, which I've never heard of.

And then who's going to be the newly featured server admin? That's the really expensive and hard part o

The common argument against open source is the requirement to have someone who knows how to run it (but this applies to anything), using a hosted service solves that at the expense of flexibility.If you have staff on hand who are capable of modifying sourcecode than chances are you already have people capable of running the server, and so a hosted service isn't your best choice.

OSS is a no brainer for a decent hosting provider, it scales financially (no extra software costs as you get more customers), and y

If you have staff on hand who are capable of modifying sourcecode than chances are you already have people capable of running the server, and so a hosted service isn't your best choice.

That statement is quite incorrect. Development and operations are two very different things. I have a development department, but I don't want to spend any of their time on the time sink that is operating a server, even if we've developed some of its code. Developer time costs more than operations time, and losing it to opera

If you publish the source code, it's open source. Which doesn't mean that you get to write to the source from which the executable is compiled. Or, for that matter, execute the binary at the hosting service, which can require payment or other requirements to do so.

If I switch my 50 user office from Exchange to Zimbra, what will I lose in functions? Will I be able to point Zimbra at a database whose schema I can edit and populate with other apps, whose objects I can CRUD from other apps, including ones I write?

Anyone offering hosted Exchange or an alternative "Outlook server" integrated with support for desktop VOIP phones (US48 unlimited minutes, or $0.02:min), at under $35 per month, that has 99.999% annual uptime and good customer service? With an API for integrating my custom apps to its features?

While it makes sense to have outlook support without requiring a plugin, they don't have native activesync support so you now need a plugin on many types of phone handsets... Last i checked, the funambol plugin was quite sucky...And sure an iphone will sync using caldav/carddav/imap but it won't do push email and you can't remote wipe the device this way...

Every time groupware/Exchange related topics appear on Slashdot (often as not an "open" replacement solution that isn't quite open, or not quite there, or both), I see a couple of references to the Citadel project:

This appears to be a very interesting offering, and I've never understood why it doesn't generate more buzz. Can anyone knowledgeable in this subject explain what is lacking in Citadel to make it a serious contender in this domain? It is compatibility with Outlook/Exchange

At a glance, they have no commercial entity trying to spam it all over the news for one. For another, they too require some commercial add-on to be 100% outlook compatible. Lastly, they make no effort to use buzzowrds like 'SaaS' or 'cloud', which I suppose ties into the first point.

It might also suck, I have no idea, I don't do groupware stuff anymore so I have no reason to try it out.

I used Citadel a few years back. It was fairly easy to install and easy to manage, although there were definitely some quirks in their terminology which made figuring it all out a little challenging. However, the reason I stopped using it was the web interface for all of the functions (mail, calendaring, etc.). It was very strange to say the least. Just didn't feel like a normal mail server like Exchange or Zimbra. I think it was based on the old BBS model or something. I also seem to remember some od

This is an area I have been following with interest, as a number of clients have asked me about ditching their Exchange servers. There are several "open source" alternatives to Exchange, all with their own drawbacks. The main ones I know of are Scalix, Zimbra, Zarafa, OpenXchange, Citadel, and OpenChange/SOGo, although there are others.

OpenChange looks the most promising in the long term, as I believe it's the only one that promises 100% open source compatibility with Outlook. All the others require some ki

If you use encryption on Gmail you lose the entire benefit since you become unable to search the mails. You end up with a slightly inconvenient IMAP server. You might as well just get a traditional Unix mail instead.

Judging from a cursory perusal of the PCI DSS quick reference guide, as long as the business has in place a policy which forbids sending payment card numbers over email in the clear, it should still be able to use a cloud-based email solution. Do you have personal knowledge which contradicts this?

A policy has to be auditable for it to be valid and PCI compliant. A PCI audit will be considerably more involved than just browsing through your gmail inbox. The audit will cover network communications, hardware, software, change processes and accountability and access controls. Anybody in human resources, finance or accounting who doesn't already know this needs to be fired.

And don't forget HIPPA, SOX and a host of other rules and regulations involving the handling different data that can so easily sli

Between April 2003 and Nov. 30, the agency fielded 23,896 complaints related to medical-privacy rules, but it has not yet taken any enforcement actions against hospitals, doctors, insurers or anyone else for rule violations. A spokesman for the agency says it has closed three-quarters of the complaints, typically because it found no violation or after it provided informal guidance to the parties involved.

As far as I can tell, SOX is probably the second-most over-hyped piece of legal misunderstanding promulgated as fact on Slashdot, position #1 being the recurring myth that ISPs are subject to common carrier regulations.

SOX applies to public companies only. From Wikipedia, it does not appear to place any specific requirements on corporate IT, except that the corporate IT will be audited for compliance with the "normal" parts of the law -- so you have to keep records on various things. This hasn't stopped people from making shit up -- if the law specifies that certain data must be "retained" for X months, Slashdotters and charlatans selling "SOX compliance" services are going to say that means the law says you have to use RAID 1000000 and update your offsite backups every 2 days. Just, cuz, you know, that's standard practice.

The law -- and I haven't read it, but I can guarantee you OP hasn't either -- doesn't say anything like that. Just like it doesn't say you have to chisel your non-digital documents in titanium sheets in case the building catches fire. It's not specifying particular standards -- it's just saying you can't be Enron. If the building catches fire or the hard drive crashes, well, you know, shit happens. Whether not installing sprinklers or not having backups was negligent or in bad faith is for a court to decide. So far, it hasn't come up.

OP -- and I don't know him, and he's probably a nice guy -- may now tell me about his personal experience with how Fortune 500 companies DO chisel Xeroxes into titanium and DO use RAID 1000000 and daily updated offsite backups AND ANYTHING ELSE IS NEGLIGENT AND WOULD GET ME THROWN INTO JAIL IN THE "REAL WORLD". And I'm probably going to ignore him because this post took all the time I want to spend talking about this. But: unless he backs his claims up with a statute, a court case, or at least a letter ruling from some relevant executive branch agency... I'd be suspicious, man. Think of all the corporate incompetence with information management (laptops with credit cards gone missing... oops) you hear about on Slashdot. Now think if Slashdot talks about anyone going to jail for that, or even getting in any real trouble.

Couldn't agree more. Most regulatory frameworks are overhyped. When you actually sit down and read the law and relevant regulations (if such exist), you realize that the hype has been fueling lots of oh-shit-what-do-I-do-now type of CYA spending for consultants and "solution providers". The real issue? Execs can't be bothered to RTFL (refer to the fine law) and such. They will listen to (and take for good money) bullshit made up by various advisors and consultants who only have their own interests in mind.

Shhhhh. Don't tell the business users. They never want to pay for system improvements because they don't "see" the effects. We used to slide in all sorts of system improvements they never would have paid for by saying that it was a "SOX requirement".

I work in computer security, and I have had training in SOx compliance, and all that you say is exactly what I learned.

All SOx requires is a clear chain of responsibility. In theory, a company could be SOx compliant if the CEO were to sign a statement saying he is personally responsible for the outcome of all business processes. Practically, no CEO will do so, therefore a clear, documented process is necessary, so that when the company does something contrary to the law, a responsible employee can be identified (and prosecuted).

SOX applies to public companies only. From Wikipedia, it does not appear to place any specific requirements on corporate IT, except that the corporate IT will be audited for compliance with the "normal" parts of the law

aren't most corporate IT departments part of public companies? In which case, storage of old data is a requisite, and besides - backups are a very important part of all IT depts anyway.

Our backup tapes are taken offsite every night as part of normal rotation, and a previous compan

position #1 being the recurring myth that ISPs are subject to common carrier regulations.

The only reason why ISPs are not subject to common carrier regulations is because the FCC is wildly (and opportunistically) misreading the Communications Act, which defines "Telecommunications" as follows:

-The term ''telecommunications'' means the transmission,between or among points specified by the user, of information of the user's choosing, withoutchange in the form or content of the information as sent and received

You've missed something that Google (and, for that matter, the Open X-Change people) haven't.

The great majority of businesses are actually pretty small. They don't need huge amounts of infrastructure - there's a good chance their entire server setup is a small box running SBS purchased 5 or 6 years ago, it's starting to look a bit elderly and the business doesn't want to commit the capital expenditure to another similar system. Something like Google apps solves that very neatly.

Hosting email, including web access and even calendaring, is not particularly CPU-intensive. A 1GHz machine would be massively overspec'd for the task. For about £200, you can get a machine with RAID and a DVD-R for backups (burn one every day, have the managing director take it home) that will easily handle the task for 50+ employees. If you go with Google instead, then you have absolutely no recourse if (as has happened in the past), they lose your data. If your company can afford to lose emails

Hosting email, including web access and even calendaring, is not particularly CPU-intensive. A 1GHz machine would be massively overspec'd for the task.

Microsoft Exchange I find can be really demanding with just ten users when there is loads of e-mails stored, Zimbra can be an issue with just it's MySQL and Java components, Novell Groupwise can be a real pain in the ass at times on slower hardware, making you wait and this is all with a minimal amount of users. Now, admittedly, the systems I've mentioned di

SOGo supports 50,000 clients on a modern dual-core machine quite happily. If your software can't even cope with ten without struggling, then that says a lot about the quality of the software.

It's been a while, but when I was at university we were providing email for a computer society with about 200 users from a 133MHz Pentium. This included SMTP, IMAP, POP3 (all encrypted), as well as Webmail. The same machine also hosted a talker, personal web pages for all of the members, and NFS shares for home di

We tried it at my company. For years! We finally shifted to Google Apps, and we're quite happy...

Here are the problems with DIY servers:

Uptime - given that we are not, and have never been, a service provider, our connection was never a datacenter-multiple-redundancies-T3-five-nines-uptime thing. At the time, it was a pair of DSLs with static IPs. Run through an elderly Linux box that acted as the router/NAT and mail server. I don't remember our uptime figures, but it was definitely not perfect.

it's also wholly unsuitable for any business needing absolute confidentiality, just like every cloud solution

Just like every solution that involves clients, nodes, servers, networks, and software not designed, built, operated, and controlled only by you. Which is pretty much all of them.

If your communications are so sensitive that HTTP over SSL with a corporation that offers you an SLA isn't enough, and you choose to send email in the clear without encryption, then your communications obviously aren't as sensitive as you think.

Exactly. "Controlled by you" is the key phrase. All private information goes over secure lines in a secure facility. That can't be assured in most (if not all) cloud environments (unless it's private, which is more of a grid or cluster than a cloud).

I spent several months working with highly-sensitive medical data. Anything containing patient information was legally allowed anywhere inside our company, but not outside. That meant all communication including such information had to stay on private servers an

I'm in that boat as well. I'd love nothing better to ditch Exchange, it's bloated hardware needs and its licensing costs, but we do a particular type of government contract and our bound by various privacy and security rules that basically make cloud-based solutions a no-go. We are required to guarantee the data stays in our jurisdiction, but more to the point that it remains under our control. Shipping it out to the cloud would very likely put us in breach of contract.

I used to consider businesses, and therefore Exchange, were the most important target public for launching Linux adoption numbers. Nowadays I think it's the average teenage/entertainment user, and therefore, msn/IM clients, games, p2p apps, media players, and the browser. Basically all they use. Yes Linux does all that, but some details of the apps, or their installation, can't be figured out by these impatient users. What I know for sure is they buy computers with Linux preinstalled, and, without even kno

Really? Setting up Sendmail + Dovecot took me a couple of hours last time I did it, and it's something I only do once every few years so I generally need to reread all of the documentation each time to remember how it all works. This is on FreeBSD, with OpenBSD's spamd in front of sendmail. The hardware costs are tiny. Any relatively modern machine should be able to handle a few hundred clients.

Webmail can be a bit more effort, although simple things like SquirrelMail are practically configuration-fr

For that few of people almost anything would work. Email isn't processor intensive, spam filtering can be a little but it isn't that much. Just need a lot of disk space per user. For personal email I use a low wattage atom processor, for a business I'd go with any raid system for a little redundancy. Software wise postfix (SMTP), dovecot (POP/IMAP) and amavisd for some spam filtering is a good fit. Plenty of walkthroughs on how to do it if you've never used the software, FreeBSD has these all as default por

The problem with this view is that it is missing some functionality that people now consider part of email thanks to Microsoft and Outlook/Exchange or Lotus Notes/Domino. If you have never worked in a company that makes use of these features you wouldn't understand - but if any of your coworkers have they will expect them from you and will find your IMAP mail system to inadequate and unacceptable.

First is Calendaring - inviting people to appointments and booking in meeting rooms and shared resources (projectors etc) to those meetings. They even will recommend times when all the attendees and equipment is free. If you change the time it informs everyone and moves in all their calendars. This is not to mention sharing your calendar with others so everyone can keep track of where/what your team is up to. And you can do all of this on your mobile phone (ActiveSync or Blackberry) and have it update your server/client immediately.

Contacts - you can see all the people in your team, department and company. You can share your contacts with your coworkers. When you or they change them your phone updates with the changes immediately. I've seen our director's assistant add contacts to his mailbox via Outlook and he can call them from his phone's contacts within less than a minute when on the road.

Delegation - your assistant/gatekeeper or the person filling in for you when you are on leave can respond to your email and meeting requests on your behalf. It even says Susie Q on Behalf of John Doe etc. You can also have a departmental or a support or an information mailbox that many people check and share responsibility for.

Not to mention that Exchange offers the significant advantages of a large ecosystem of applications, tools and trained professionals that can back it up, maintain it, fix it, merge it, replicate it and all kinds of other things that you will eventually need to do in the life-cycle of an average modern mail system. I am dealing with a merger of two companies at the moment and them both running Exchange is a godsend - I'm glad it isn't an OpenExchange system I am having to merge with...

Not to mention that Exchange offers the significant advantages of a large ecosystem of applications, tools and trained professionals that can back it up, maintain it, fix it, merge it, replicate it and all kinds of other things that you will eventually need to do in the life-cycle of an average modern mail system. I am dealing with a merger of two companies at the moment and them both running Exchange is a godsend - I'm glad it isn't an OpenExchange system I am having to merge with...

Exchange 2003 (now 8 years old) was really I/O heavy and wasn't really designed with large mailboxes in mind. Think back to the average mailbox and attachment size in 2003 (what was your HD size 8 years ago for example) and I think that they thought they exceeded what was necessary for a mail system but it is not really workable for a large organisation with modern needs any longer and buckles a bit under modern expectations - especially on older hardware.

Two weeks ago, I knew next to nothing about mail administration. I do however have enough experience as generic sysadmin.
Took me about 3-4 hours reading into documentation for smtp, imap, exim (+addons), then about half an hour of configuration and now our working group (30 people) has a nicely working public facing mail server, all with aliases, mailing lists, synchronisation,...

This would be funny if it wasn't true in a way. Many non-technical users are treating computers as a system: to them, software and hardware are hard to distinguish. If it doesn't work, you get a new one. Plenty of perfectly good (hardware-wise) PCs have been tossed because Windows has ceased to operate (usually due to malware).